


the one where nnoitra survives but everything is still awful

by Tozette



Category: Bleach
Genre: Arrancar, Episode Related, Gen, Some People Live, relentless discussion of canon typical cannibalism, technically grimmjow shows up too
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-19
Updated: 2017-07-19
Packaged: 2018-12-04 04:56:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11547933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: Nnoitra wakes up.He’s not what you’d call thrilled.





	the one where nnoitra survives but everything is still awful

Nnoitra wakes up.

He’s not what you’d call thrilled.

It isn’t the first time that the rapid regeneration he has in resereccion has saved him from a killing blow, but it’s among the most disappointing.

That shinigami…

The moon is high above, huge and swollen.

He blinks. He has two arms again, and the shaft of Santa Teresa is a heavy weight across his stomach. The blade’s broken, but it will recover as his strength does. The wounds across his chest have stopped bleeding, but he’s going to have a big ragged scar.

That shini…

He can feel a familiar reiatsu, but it’s all wrong. Weak. Soft-strange, jagged. Fraying around the edges. It’s…

Nnoitra rolls over, feeling everything in him protest loudly. His teeth clench on their own. It’s basically a smile. Pain’s how you know you’re alive.

“Oi, Tesla,” he croaks. There’s no answer forthcoming, no immediate _yes sir_ , just the slumped bloody form of his fraccion made pale under the moon.

Nnoitra heaves himself to his knees, then braces against Santa Teresa for leverage to his feet. Up. Up. Back on his feet.

Tesla’s staring. He’s not dead, because dead things dissipate into a rush of reishi in Hueco Mundo. He’s not dead but he’s not responding, and his reiatsu is…

If Tesla was still an adjuchas, Nnoitra would say without question that he’s regressing. Injured too badly, not enough food or power - it all means one thing for an adjuchas: regression. It’s a constant fear, and what drives most of them in some way.

As an arrancar…  

Nnoitra looks sideways at his own zanpakuto. An arrancar is supposed to be stable. The spirits of consumed hollows certainly don’t trouble _him_ any further.

Verruca’s completely missing, though. Telsa doesn’t have enough power left to store it in a zanpakuto like that.

He must be running on fumes.

Nnoitra leans heavily on his weapon and considers.

Regression from adjuchas to gillian is more than a reduction in power, it’s an loss of personality. The shreds of souls that war beneath the reasonably coherent personality in an adjuchas reassert themselves, and the individual is annihilated. There’s no hope of that personality returning. The individual is gone.

Nnoitra regards Tesla in silence for a few moments. He hasn’t seen an arrancar regress before. They’re a lot more stable, especially the more powerful ones. But there’s no reason he can think of why an arrancar, sufficiently weakened, wouldn’t regress.

Instinct says to just eat him. He’s not that likely to recover and Nnoitra could use the energy. Besides, he can’t regress if Nnoitra eats him, so. Problem solved.

But Nnoitra takes him by the ankle and drags him away instead, carving messy drag marks into the white dunes. Neither of them are safe out in the open like this.

He can’t feel Aizen - cannot, in fact, feel any of the shinigami, or Starrk, or Barragan. Hallibel is still kicking, a thundercloud of damp energy out west. Ulquiorra must be dead because Nnoitra can feel him fading like smoke on a breeze. Grimmjow feels like a ghostly thing, a dispersed power dragging itself back together piece by piece.

All up, it’s a pretty bleak tally.

Below number six there’s nothing at all. Not even Szayel, which strikes Nnoitra as… strange. 

It figures that Nnoitra would survive. In essentials, he’s harder to kill than almost anyone. His body is tough as hell, and his regeneration speed is unheard of. If only that dumbass shinigami had had the wherewithal to break his mask and cut his head off.

Well.

There’ll be another fight.

There always is.

He drags Tesla to a cave. It’s far enough away from Hallibel not to make him feel on edge and Grimmjow doesn’t register as any kind of threat right now. Tesla’s eye’s open, staring at nothing, red-rimmed like he’s been crying.

That idea makes Nnoitra feel weird. He stares at Tesla’s blank, staring face for a second and tries to picture tears. It doesn’t work. The idea’s ludicrous - Tesla’s just as hard and cool as any other arrancar. Tears of pure physiological pain are technically possible but still seem unlikely. Dying doesn't hurt enough to make Tesla _cry_.

Nnoitra slumps against the cave wall. What he needs now is food and rest. Anything else can wait.

He toes Tesla in the side with the curving tip of his boot and doesn’t get so much as a twitch. Just staring eyes, roiling reiatsu.

Tesla probably needs food too, although it’s hard to say how he might consume it. Whatever struggle’s going on beneath the surface of his reiatsu is eating up plenty of energy.

Nnoitra is tired. Sluggish. Exhausted. He wants rest, but –

He gets up. He hasn’t seen much in the way of other hollows here but he knows where he can find them - Grimmjow’s diffuse, waning energy has the scent of something weak and delicious.

Nnoitra finds him sitting up, more or less conscious, and staring down a huge badger-shaped adjuchas. It’s so obviously just waiting for Grimmjow to falter - to sleep or pass out or waver.

Nnoitra comes upon it sideways in a too-slow sonido. Still faster than any piss weak little adjuchas. And Santa Teresa’s still sharp enough for this. He rams the sharpest inner crescent into the hollow, shearing through its back legs on an angle but preserving it alive.

Grimmjow’s blue eyes roll up toward him. Tired. There’s no glow of power behind them now. Too injured. He bares his teeth anyway.

…there’s no way he can fight Nnoitra off. Not a chance. He can’t even fucking walk, Nnoitra could…

He tries to dredge up the motivation, but all he feels is tired.

“Tch,” Nnoitra mutters. “Pathetic.” He spits on the sand, and then drags his struggling prize back to the cave. Whatever. Grimmjow’s way more trouble than he’s worth. Always.

He scoops up one of the badger-shaped adjuchas’s back legs as he goes and eats it on the way. He doesn’t have the same skill for gonzui that Ulquiorra and Yammy do; he gets his nutrients the old fashioned way: teeth.

He leaves the other back leg out there. He doesn’t have enough hands. It won’t go to waste, anyway.

Nothing’s located the cave by the time he gets back - or, if it has, Nnoitra’s reiatsu signature is enough to send it packing.

Tesla hasn’t changed.

Nnoitra watches him for a moment, tapping his fingertips on the haft of his weapon. He’ll give him until next moonrise, he decides, dumping his distressed dinner in the dirt.

If there’s no change for the better by then, Nnoitra will eat him. 

He’ll just… He’ll give it a while, first. 

**Author's Note:**

> Pulled from tumblr because it got posted there but I forgot to put it here.


End file.
